Currently, most multimedia services are offered over broadband wired networks. However, wired networks may be too costly for rural areas, where infrastructure deployment is costly and difficult. Additionally, there are many other practical applications that require robust wireless transmission of digital content without compromising service quality, such as content transmission in planes.
Near Video-on-Demand (NVoD) broadcast-oriented protocols, such as periodic broadcast, patching, and bandwidth skimming, divide media files into segments. These segments are simultaneously broadcasted at different rates according to their impact on content playback delay. The clients receive multiple streams at a time, with an aggregate transmission rate that is proportional to real-time content playing rate. Existing protocols do not directly deal with packet losses and redundant packets, which are common in wireless networks. Error protection is achieved by introducing protocol overheads. These protocols are mostly intended for wired networks, and for Internet nVoD systems.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,941,825 discloses an efficient NVoD service method for various client environments designed for transmitting video data from a server to a plurality of clients. This method is based on identifying the relative network bandwidth of a client with respect to the video playout bandwidth, and dividing the video data into data segments of different sizes according to their relative bandwidth. As is the case with other related art publications, this disclosure does not address how to solve the fundamental problem of error correction during transmissions.
Currently, there is a need for protocols, schemas, architectures, methods, and systems to improve the service quality in digital transmission applications by implementing novel error correction methods with low overhead.